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Holism and the Book of Nature |
by Geoff Ward
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the Italian physicist, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, famously said: ‘Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.’ He also asserted: ‘Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.’
The late Danish theologian Olaf Pedersen, in 1992, suggested that Galileo’s metaphor of nature as a mathematical narrative was a basis for the reconciliation of science and theology.
In the first address given in response to Pope John Paul II’s call in 1987 for an urgent rapprochement between scientists and theologians, Pedersen advised that the best means to achieve this might be to recover the ancient concept of nature as a ‘second testament’. |
Galileo Galilei |
The textual metaphor of a book of nature, strong in Western tradition, goes back to Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, in which each organism is regarded as a sign or symbol, part of a message in a kind of code which the scientist was later charged with deciphering.
Francis Bacon |
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the English scientist, philosopher and statesman, wrote that there were two revelations: the first given to us in scripture and tradition, having guided our thinking for centuries; the second given by the universe, the ‘book’ we are just starting to read.
The quest to uncover a divine design in the universe spurred Bacon, the physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and the Renaissance natural theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries. |
But the book of nature, once to be understood through mathematics as Galileo envisaged, and in accordance with God’s word, became obscured in the 19th and 20th centuries when the theory of evolution, and the new notions of deep space and deep time, served to inculcate a pessimistic view of our place in the universe.
This was that we exist merely on an insignificant planet in orbit around an average star in a run-of-the-mill galaxy; that although Earth has life, it may not be that unusual or important, and that because the distances are so vast there is such little chance of locating intelligent life elsewhere that we might as well be alone in the cosmos; in short, that the universe was out to persuade us that we are nothing very special.
Copernicus |
Inevitably, the Copernican revolution dislodged human beings from the centre of the physical universe, but at the same time it reconvened our relationship to the universe on a different level.
The new astronomy after Copernicus not only realigned the human subject as a rational being capable of understanding the structure of the cosmos through mathematical endeavour, it also paved the way for the realisation that, crucially, we are the universe contemplating itself - surely a privileged position. |
At a conference entitled Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life, held by the Pontifical Academy of Science in Rome in the autumn of 2008, Pope Benedict XVI opened the plenary assembly by using the ‘book of nature’ as a primary interpretative metaphor, even for evolution. He said:
......To ‘evolve’ literally means ‘to unroll a scroll’, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose ‘writing’ and meaning, we ‘read’ according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos.
Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is ‘legible’. It has an inbuilt ‘mathematics’. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a ‘cosmography’, studying measurable phenomena, but also in a ‘cosmology’ discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos.
The conference was attended by scientists including Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Werner Arber and Michael Heller, but at the end of the day, although the Pope declared there was no opposition between the Church’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences, theological position and Darwinian theory, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to coalesce.
What we have here, in all of the above, is the concept of holism which seems to have been a natural attribute of ancient civilizations (or state societies, as archaeologists prefer to call them), and which today has re-emerged in the embrace of ‘New Age’ thinking in general and, in particular, Herma Koornwinder’s vision of an underlying order in the universe based on number, geometry and proportion, and reflected in the movements of global financial markets, earth energies, and the arts and architecture of the ancient world.
The Natural Genesis website (www.naturalgenesis.net), for example, which describes itself as ‘a sourcebook for the worldwide discovery of a creative organic universe’ offers a ‘holistic vista’, with more than 1,500 references testifying to a ‘once and future encounter with an embryonic, numinous universe’. These references show that more and more researchers and scholars advocate an organically self-organizing universe which can return life and intelligence to central significance: ‘People are once more of cosmic notice, this time as its leading, creative, spiritual edge.’
This idea, of course, goes back to the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), and the ‘myth of meaning’, which for him was the myth of consciousness. The cognising and reflecting consciousness gives rise to creative activity which superimposes on the existence of the outer and inner worlds, or realities, the assertion that they are known. For Jung, the cosmic meaning of consciousness was that man was indispensable for the completion of creation, that man himself was the ‘second creator of the world’, and had alone given the world its objective existence.
Carl Gustav Jung |
‘Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being,’ Jung says in his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections, published posthumously in 1963.
Thus each and every one of us is a mythic participant in creation. |
As Karen Armstrong says, all mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, and that in some sense supports it. The neolithic revolution had made people aware of a creative and timeless energy that pervaded the cosmos and supported human existence, and the idea inherent in myth subsequently was to tap into this energy. In her A Short History of Myth (2005), Armstrong insists that we need myths to help us venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’.
In Jungian terms, each of us has a myth to live by and our myths can fill our lives with meaning; consciousness itself is mytho-poetic.
The term ‘holism’ was invented by the South African statesman Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950) in his book Holism and Evolution (1926). Smuts saw holism as:
......the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organising, regulative activity in the universe which accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from the atom and the physico-chemical structures, through the cell and organisms, through Mind and animals, to Personality in man. The all-pervading and ever-increasing character of synthetic unity or wholeness in these structures leads to the concept of Holism as the fundamental activity underlying and co-ordinating all others, and to the view of the universe as a Holistic Universe.
New Age science and philosophy, which follows this lead, is a very interesting trend, although some might see it as more of a religious belief system which, in western society, corresponds to a new ‘faith’ alternative to, or even replacing, that of the conventional church. New Age philosophers do indeed seek a true, holistic reality underlying everyday existence and, within this, take on board the latest scientific knowledge and theory which supports this endeavour. Their quest for a ‘grand unified theory’ certainly seems to have a strong religious aspect, and harks back to the ‘natural philosophy’ of the 18th century.
Among key figures who are brought into this scenario is the American-born British quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) whose theory of the implicate order suggested that as each fragment of a hologram held information about the entire object, this could be a good model for the universe itself.
Another is the Austrian neurobiologist Karl Pribam (b1919) who said that each memory fragment was distributed over the whole of the brain so that each part of the brain contained information about the whole. |
David Bohm
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Also, there’s the work of the Russian 1977 Nobel prize-winner in chemistry Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) who launched the theory of the ‘self-organising universe’ - the idea that the universe is evolving in an open-ended process of creative self-organisation, and proving, for New Age thinkers at least, that the universe is alive. And, of course, there’s the well-known ‘Gaia hypothesis’ of James Lovelock, the British environmentalist, which suggests the Earth is a living organism.
However, in her holistic theory of self, the American-born physicist and philosopher Danah Zohar rightly points out that if holism is to have any real meaning, any ‘teeth’, it must be grounded in the physics of consciousness, and for this we must turn to quantum mechanics if we are to usher in that kind of participative view of our relationship with the universe advocated by Jung.
It is, after all, from the universal quantum field in nature that human consciousness arises, infused with mythopoeic potential accumulated during the emergence from primeval unconsciousness. I adhere to the view of consciousness as a gestalt, a uniting, participative human experience rather than one subjective only to the individual.
Zohar asserts in her ground-breaking The Quantum Self (1990) that, in our essential being, we are made of the same stuff and held together by the same dynamics as those which account for everything else in the universe. ‘And equally,’ she adds, ‘which brings out the enormity of this realisation, the universe is made of the same stuff and held together by the same dynamics as those which account for us.’
Bohm, who worked with Einstein at Princeton University in the early 1950s, developed a theory of quantum physics which took a holistic view of existence, his scientific and philosophical views having become inseparable. He was unafraid to challenge scientific orthodoxy, his interests and influence reaching well beyond physics into the realms of biology, psychology, religion, art and the future prospects for society.
In 1959, Bohm read a book by the Indian philosopher J Krishnamurti and realised how his own ideas on quantum mechanics blended with Krishnamurti’s philosophical ideas. Bohm’s approach to philosophy and physics, which saw matter and consciousness as an interrelated whole, found expression in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), in which he argued that the ‘unbroken wholeness’ of all existence could be seen as an undivided flowing movement without boundaries, and that, ultimately, it would be shown that there was no distinction between mind and matter.
Bohm envisaged an ‘implicate order’, enveloping time, space and matter, although the presence of it could be only inferred by observation of its various manifestations. This implicate order ‘unfolded’ into the explicate order, the visible and tangible universe. Bohm’s analogy was a pattern made from small cuts in a folded piece of paper, then unfolded. Widely separated elements of the pattern were produced by the same original cuts in the folded paper. The cuts represented the implicate order and the unfolded pattern the explicate order. This suggests a parallel with Jung’s view of human consciousness deriving from the collective unconscious.
It was Bohm’s hope that people would eventually recognise the fundamental inter-relatedness of all things and would join together to create a more holistic and harmonious world.
Rupert Sheldrake |
Bohm’s work is complemented by the ‘formative causation’ theory of the biochemist and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, which envisages the existence of invisible organizing fields operating through ‘morphic resonance’, a holistic concept of natural form and growth.
If the theory of morphic resonance was generally accepted, then Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious would become mainstream. |
Sheldrake supports the proposal first made by the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch in 1922 that ‘morphogenetic fields’ give rise to form - morphogenesis being the process under which all biological forms develop from simpler forms. These fields are said to govern cells and tissues by arranging their characteristic shapes in the embryo.
For Sheldrake, whose 1981 book A New Science of Life was published in its third edition in 2009, DNA alone is not enough to explain morphogenesis. This is because, if part of an embryo is removed, the remaining section still has a morphogenetic field associated with it. The field is continuous and holistic, not atomistic, and so bits cannot be cut away from them; the complete form is restored because the field remains whole. As Sheldrake says, this ‘brings more from less’.
Sheldrake suggests that morphic resonance is responsible for the way in which patterns and forms are repeated in nature. As I suggested in my book, Spirals: the Pattern of Existence (2006), which is all about the idea of a creative, organising and unifying principle at work in the universe, the provenance of these manifestations could lie in the kind of implicate order envisaged by Bohm, and we detect the resonance - the ‘sculpting’ of random energy into pattern and form - in the explicate order, the world of things.
The additional metaphor of a ‘genetic code’, and the likening of the genome to text and alphabet, lies within that same Western tradition under which nature is seen as being comprised of entities accessible through writing or couched in cipher.
Genome is the name given to the complete set of genetic material of an organism which transmits the form of the molecular make-up of the body from generation to generation. It is the narrator of the story of life, holding strong connotations to the notion of ‘scripture’ which is central to the western religious canon; thus the ‘book of nature’ idea can also be found in the concept of codes used in contemporary life sciences.
Forward-thinking people who are engaged today in our key metaphysical task of the continual expansion of consciousness - and Herma Koornwinder is among them - are taking up Galileo’s challenge to comprehend the ancient language of the book of nature, and offer a new and holistic translation of it in the attempt to unravel the cosmic code and reveal the hidden structure and order of the universe.
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The extraordinary thing about the Koornwinder Conventions is that their origins lie in Herma's amazing discovery, when she was a global markets analyst, that there was an order to the movements of share prices when everyone in the investments industry believed them to be random.
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